Childhood in Springfield influenced 'Happy Jail' cinematographer

Dean Olsen The State Journal-Register @deanolsenSJR

Monday

Sep 9, 2019 at 7:21 PM

What began as a fascination with the Super 8 camera his father used in the late 1970s and early 1980s to make home movies in Springfield grew into a filmmaking career that most recently took Craig Trudeau to the Philippines, where he oversaw shooting of the new Netflix documentary series, “Happy Jail.”

The docuseries was sparked by interest surrounding the 2007 viral video of inmates of a provincial jail in the Southeast Asian island country dancing in unison to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.”

It may be surprising that one of the main personalities behind a project examining a challenged criminal detention system in a country 8,400 miles away would hail from Springfield.

But Trudeau, 41, said the communication skills he gained from growing up in the capital city, and an interest in lasers and light that the late Carolyn Blessman nurtured as his seventh-grade science teacher at the now-shuttered Cathedral Grade School, served him well during the filming of “Happy Jail” and throughout his career as a cinematographer.

A photography director in the film industry needs to gain the trust of his subjects and portray the truth while producing something that’s visually compelling, Trudeau said.

“Maybe there’s a Midwestern sensibility of, ‘I’m not better than you’ and ‘I’m not worse than you,’” he said during a recent phone interview after the August release of the five-episode "Happy Jail."

“I think there may be something to that, coming from the Midwest where you just take people for what they are,” he said.

Acclaim and pride for documentaries

Craig Trudeau, a 1996 graduate of Springfield High School, is the oldest of three children of Dr. Ed Trudeau, a Memorial Health System physician, and Caren Trudeau, owner of Rolling Meadows Farm Brewery in Cantrall.

He has worked as a lighting technician and cinematographer for 20 years after attending Vancouver Film School in Canada. He said he was part of a big project for the first time on “X2: X-Men United.” He also has worked as a cinematographer for a variety of smaller-scale movies and documentaries, including 2009’s “Machotaildrop,” and 2006’s “Harvey Spannos.”

Now living in Los Angeles, he said he wasn’t always able to work full time in his preferred profession. He had other jobs, including painting barns in Cantrall and working at a St. Louis coffee shop. He also shot and continues to shoot corporate videos, commercials and educational materials for a charitable foundation.

Trudeau was the cinematographer, and worked with his now-life partner and director Michele Josue, 40, on the 2014 Daytime Emmy-winning documentary “Matt Shepard Is a Friend of Mine.”

The film is about the gay University of Wyoming student who died at age 21 in 1998 after being beaten and tortured and tied to a fence in a rural area near Laramie, Wyoming.

Despite the critical acclaim that the documentary received, Trudeau said he is most proud of "Happy Jail," which was filmed in 2016 and 2017 and for which he also served as a producer.

“That’s just another whole level of the film world that I had done in the past but never really been credited for,” Trudeau said. “I think it’s just a very special story and something that a lot of people could maybe watch and learn something from or just see some differences or similarities.”

Financed at first by individual investors and then by Netflix, an online video platform serving more than 190 countries, the "Happy Jail" docuseries chronicles life at the Philippine equivalent of a county jail in the province of Cebu where inmates are being held while their cases are being decided in court.

The male and female inmates still dance, as they did in 2007, and generate additional revenue for the facility by regular performances for audiences allowed inside the jail’s walls.

But Trudeau said the exceedingly bureaucratic and slow criminal justice system in the Philippines results in inmates, most of whom were arrested for drug-related crimes, being held for five to 10 years while awaiting the outcome of charges that, upon conviction, would result in sentences of only, say, three years.

“It’s insanely slower — slower than you can imagine,” he said. “They do have a bail system, but it doesn’t work effectively. It’s puzzling, I know. I hope it becomes clear as you watch the episodes.”

Trudeau, as well as Josue, who is Filipino-American, and their crew were given unprecedented access to the jail by a new “consultant,” or warden, who was appointed by the provincial governor to run the facility.

The hiring of this man, Marco Toral, a former inmate of the facility who was imprisoned for drug crimes and later saw his conviction reversed, attracts criticism from the former provincial governor, which the series documents.

But many current inmates are filmed saying that they appreciate the changes he has made to make life more tolerable at the overcrowded facility, which Toro labels the Happy Jail.

"We sought to tell a story about an almost impossible situation being endured by people who happen to have found in themselves a very unique way to get through it," Trudeau said. "Dancing and music made that jail almost liveable, along with Marco's changes to the family visitation policies. It really felt like a jail that a person could actually get 'reformed' in. However, when you have so many people living on top of one another, things get pretty chaotic.”

The series, he said, provides “a way to see a situation, as untenable as it may be, or as hard as things may get, to find some hope. At its core is people using creativity to make thinks like joy in their life."

Interest in filming nourished as child

Trudeau’s own background wasn’t so desperate, but he said it was impactful.

He was born in Rochester, Minnesota, where his father was completing residency training at Mayo Clinic in physical medicine and rehabilitation. He came to Springfield with his family when he was a toddler.

Trudeau began to use his father’s Super 8 camera, and other film and video cameras he later would acquire, during his adolescence as a way to deal with boredom in Springfield.

“Without driving to St. Louis or Chicago, there wasn’t a whole lot going on, so we would make things to occupy our time, really,” he said. “I would film my friends skateboarding and various other things that interested me.”

That was about the time Ms. Blessman’s lessons got him interested in the science surrounding light. Trudeau said he won a science fair with his grade-school science project on lasers and the electromagnetic spectrum.

The award led to trips to the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Batavia that nourished his interest in filming. “There’s a cross-over between art and science,” he said.

“Being a director of photography, you’re engineering situations in order to capture the footage, and you need to use whatever tools are available to you,” Trudeau said. “It’s kind of like solving a little problem every time, or a lot of problems, to be quite honest.”

Soft skills associated with communication can be just as important, he added.

“Especially with documentary, you really have to establish a relationship off-camera before you can record anything,” Trudeau said. “That’s extremely important for trust — to have someone trust you enough to tell you their stories, to tell you the truth.

“There’s something about the lens that can change a situation, and in documentary, the work is really to prevent that from happening, prevent someone from becoming self-conscious or second-guessing themselves and changing the way they do something.”

Several of Trudeau’s his early films dealt with skateboarding and punk rock music, both obsessions of his as an adolescent.

He said he wasn’t into organized sports as a kid but was an avid and "half-decent" skateboarder, often hanging out at Springfield’s Skank Skates, and was part of several local punk rock bands as a singer and guitar player.

“I enjoyed all of the things that go along with skateboarding and rock 'n' roll, which is kind of being out with your friends at night and rolling around and making your own sort of entertainment and excitement,” he said.

His father, Ed Trudeau, 69, said he has marveled at his son’s endurance and enjoyment in almost constantly being on the move.

Ed Trudeau said his son said something out of the blue when he was 11 or 12: “Dad, when I grow up, I want to live in hotels.”

Craig Trudeau said he probably was envisioning what life as a filmmaker would be like when he said that, and his wish has come to pass.

Even though he’s not an “A-list” filmmaker — at least not yet — and had no family connections to smooth his path in the industry, Trudeau said he is earning a middle-class living — less than $100,000 a year.

And he is traveling, mostly throughout the United States and Canada, almost every week or every few weeks.

“I just had to make it work,” he said. “It’s a good life, and I wouldn’t trade it.”